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The suspicion of Catholics that grew in the wake of the Boston Common arrests soon took on broader dimensions. In the late 1880s it focused on a contest over the city’s public schools, largely led by two women’s groups, the Loyal Women of American Liberty and the Independent Women Voters, both of them strongly anti-Catholic. The contest also raised moralistic tensions around social class, as evangelical Protestant temperance forces found themselves in political conflict with an alliance of convenience between upper-class Protestants and Roman Catholics. Conspiratorial thinking among...

The suspicion of Catholics that grew in the wake of the Boston Common arrests soon took on broader dimensions. In the late 1880s it focused on a contest over the city’s public schools, largely led by two women’s groups, the Loyal Women of American Liberty and the Independent Women Voters, both of them strongly anti-Catholic. The contest also raised moralistic tensions around social class, as evangelical Protestant temperance forces found themselves in political conflict with an alliance of convenience between upper-class Protestants and Roman Catholics. Conspiratorial thinking among conservative Protestants was also spurred by anti-Masonic rhetoric, British-American immigrants and their resentment of Irish-Catholics, and a form of premillennial eschatology that encouraged evangelicals to see themselves as an embattled but righteous minority in cosmic struggle with the forces of irreligion.